The Pearl Thief Read online

  ‘What kind of something?’

  ‘Oh, well … anything. You know. Any thing.’

  I was still too dazed to be alarmed at this subtle innuendo, though obviously I’d nearly had my head smashed in. Surely not by the same person who said he’d found me unconscious? Who’d be stupid enough to ambush someone and then deliver her to the hospital?

  I began to take an inventory of my working parts as Mary spoke. Impossible to move my head without being sick. Crikey! Did someone actually hit me, or did I somehow crack my skull on the slab of rock I’d been sitting on? My tongue caught on the jagged edge of a tooth – it was chipped. I poked gingerly at the snaggly enamel with a fingertip, then moved my hand so my friend could see my mouth shape these words:

  ‘Oh, Mary! Do I look like a hag?’

  She answered a little briskly, ‘You’re quite as lovely as ever.’

  It was probably the most thoughtless thing I’d ever said to her.

  I wished I’d never woken up. I wished I could start all over again and never have let her see vain, coquettish Julie whose first thought in the world is always for the way people see her. Mary Kinnaird lives like a hermit most of the time because people who don’t treat her like a cretin are scared of her. She has the kindest face in the world but it is not a face like everyone else’s.

  When you say something that hurtful it only draws attention to it if you try to take it back. So I didn’t. I reached further up my head to explore the bump and the bandages, and discovered what was left of my hair.

  I am ashamed to put down here what happened next, but I shall, as a sort of penance for being so utterly shallow.

  ‘Oh, Mary, how could you! “Quite as lovely as ever.” Oh, what happened? Who did this to me – why?’

  I sobbed pitiably. You could say like a three-year-old, except that I would not have howled about my hair when I was three.

  It was all gone.

  I could feel the different lengths all around my head – much shorter near the great big bump than on the sides. I think the doctor sawed it off tidily at the back of my head first, to get at the wound, and then that – that witch of a nurse took the rest off to even it up.

  ‘What will everyone say when I go back to school?’ I wailed. ‘That cat Nancy Brooke will laugh her head off. And just when I’m finally old enough to wear it up for dances – and my sixteenth birthday coming …’

  Well, I am embarrassed. But that is what I said, and more besides.

  ‘Darling, don’t cry over your hair, for goodness’ sake,’ Mary scolded. ‘That’s not the brave lassie I know at all!’

  Her voice was warmer now. I think she must have attributed my excess of vanity to the dunt on my head, because she hastened on to more important things.

  ‘Now, I’ll say it again, because I’m afraid you’re a bit woozy – you said your people are expecting you back today, but they’ve no idea you’re here, so I must tell them now. I suppose I should have rung someone before I came to see if it was really you, but the papers this morning said you hadn’t woken up yet and I thought, if it was you, it was more important someone should be with you when you did wake up …’ She trailed off.

  I think it is lack of company in general that makes her so loquacious with people she trusts. Just now it left me rather breathless with emotion and confusion.

  ‘Anyway I must go and tell your lady mother!’ she finished with great purpose.

  ‘Please warn my mother’s companion Solange about my hair,’ I said selflessly. ‘She was my nanny and she will be just as upset as I am.’

  Mary Kinnaird got up and hurried off back to Strathfearn.

  I managed to roll over on my side and was able to get a better view of the rest of the ward. The explosive headache began to subside and I grew increasingly aware that my mouth felt like it was full of sandpaper. I hadn’t eaten or drunk anything for three days – apparently I’d been given fluid injections while I was unconscious, but I was desperate for a glass of water. I had no idea how to get anyone’s attention, and I thought I could help myself to a drink from the jug on the trolley at the end of the bed next to mine.

  Gravity helped me to topple out of my own bed. They had dressed me in a hospital gown that felt like it was made out of newspaper, tied at the neck and waist and otherwise completely open to the elements. It did not cover my backside as I crawled to the trolley.

  It all took a lot longer than I expected it to, and when I got there I couldn’t stand up or lift the jug.

  Defeated, I crawled indecently back to my own bed – getting into it was like scaling Mont Blanc. All the exercise combined to set upon my skewed equilibrium as if I were at sea in a Tay coble in a tempest. I had to stop and close my eyes and take some deep breaths before I attempted the battle to get back under the covers.

  I heard somebody say, ‘Dirty wee besom. You saw that? Bold as brass. Asking for trouble.’

  And a voice that answered, ‘That’s their kind. No modesty at all.’

  I seem to be good at asking for trouble.

  I was not so successful at asking for water. Although I finally had the attention of the nurse on the ward and spoke politely, she downright refused me.

  ‘Not if you put on airs, you sleekit Lady Muck,’ she told me in tones of Cairngorm mountain granite. ‘I’ll not be mocked by your kind.’ She took hold of the trolley that held the water jug and wheeled it away.

  I was left gaping. What had I done? How could she think I was mocking her? Was it because I’d said ‘please’? Surely I was expected to say ‘please’?

  She passed me twice more in the next hour and both times I asked her again, taking care to keep it simple and polite:

  ‘Please may I have a glass of water?’

  How could I be putting on airs? I’d never felt so pathetic in my life. It is true you can hear Landed Gentry in my ordinary accent, but I’d never had anybody take offence at it before.

  ‘That’s their kind,’ the horrid woman had sneered at my lack of discretion on the floor. ‘I’ll not be mocked by your kind.’

  Whose kind? Truant finishing-school girls home for the summer? Did she somehow scent my grandmother’s French blood in me? Had I raved in my sleep about the unchaperoned skiing holiday last winter? Who did she think I was? One of the ‘tinker folk’ whom Mary said had brought me in?

  Of course. The headline Mary had quoted from the front page of the Mercury explained it all: ‘Tinker Lass Left for Dead’. The adjectives the nurse had used on me already – dirty, bold, sleekit – were all implied in that one damning word, tinker. Their kind. Angus Henderson, and the steamroller driver and the man on the telephone in the hall at Strathfearn House had all used the same words.

  The nurse thought I was a Traveller, like the people who brought me here. That’s why she thought I was dirty. That’s why she thought I was indiscreet. That’s why she thought I was making fun of her by putting on airs.

  I suppose my bare feet and bare arms and cast-off clothes hadn’t helped my case much when I first arrived.

  Whoever they were, the folk who brought me here had gone out of their way to help me. They were charitable. They were good and decent people. No one should be sneering at them.

  It made me mad.

  At which point I was sitting there seething quite helplessly, when two more visitors came in to see me.

  They were a girl and a boy, about my own age. They appeared to be twins. The boy was fully one foot taller than me, and they both had glorious ginger hair like Mary Queen of Scots (or how I imagine Mary Queen of Scots, anyway), and the pale clear skin to match. The girl walked like the goddess Athena, head high, looking neither left nor right. The boy came in furtively behind her, moving in absolute silence, as though with every step he was expecting to be shouted at to leave. There were curtained screens at the foot of some of the beds in the ward, and he stepped cautiously between them, not daring to catch the eye of any of the other patients. Both the girl and the boy wore much-mended clothes, pat
ched at the elbows and let down at the hems. The girl had a small closed basket like Grandad’s fisherman’s creel slung on a strap over her shoulder.

  She stopped next to my bed. She fixed me with stony eyes the dark blue of descending storm clouds, and continued to hold my gaze while she beckoned her brother with a shake of her head. He came to stand next to her, saw consciousness in my face and smiled.

  ‘Well now, Davie Balfour!’ he said warmly.

  Even if I did once spend three months demanding that everyone in the household call me Davie (they might have been more indulgent if it had not also been my eldest brother’s name), I don’t expect to be recognised when I’m in drag as one of my favourite literary obsessions. Astonishment and joy made me want to laugh, only I couldn’t because my head still felt like it was being gently but methodically drubbed with a mallet. I tried weakly to manage a responsive grin.

  ‘You’re awake,’ the girl observed.

  ‘Only just,’ I said.

  The boy padded silently to my side and knelt there. ‘Better than you were. We came again later after we brought you, the first day, to see if you’d wakened yet. We came yesterday too, and you were still away wi’ the fairies.’

  ‘What happened to me? Do you know what happened to me?’

  He shook his head.

  ‘Do you not know yourself?’ the girl asked coolly from the foot of my bed.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked. She was so self-assured, so queenly, that I thought I ought to recognise her, and I was worried she would be offended that I didn’t.

  ‘We found you,’ she answered.

  They were the dirty bold sleekit tinkers.

  They were not dirty, did not appear to be all that bold, and it remained to be seen how sneaky they were. In fact, I was floored by the girl’s beauty. She was quite Mary Kinnaird’s opposite: no kindness in her face at all, but oh, what loveliness of form in everything about her – tall and lithe with the long legs of a ballet dancer, a tiny v of ivory showing between her collarbones just above the top button of her blue and green gingham blouse, and her long hair like a flaming cloud spilling down her shoulders. Could Mary possibly feel like this looking at me, this mixture of worship and envy?

  ‘I found you lying on the path that leads from the burn up to Inchfort Field, wearing a lad’s kilt, your hair and tam all matted with blood,’ said the boy. ‘You started up and told me your name was Davie Balfour, then tumbled over out cold, on your face, at my feet. So I carried you over to our camping place. When you slept on, my mam tucked you in with my sister for the night. And then the next day when you still didn’t wake we brought you here in our cousin’s van.’

  I couldn’t believe I’d spent a night sleeping beside that goddess-like creature and didn’t remember her.

  She was still gazing down at me with the cold stare of an intrigued scientist. ‘What’s your real name?’ she asked.

  I was faintly, irrationally disappointed.

  ‘You don’t believe I’m David Balfour?’

  The boy gave a comical grimace and shook his head. ‘Nor did I believe you the first time, either,’ he said. ‘But then you fell over before you could change your story.’

  I decided to change my story a little. I was wary of being accused again of putting on airs and really didn’t want to make the wrong impression.

  ‘I’m Julie Stuart.’

  Julie Stuart is my name. Just not all of it.

  ‘How are you the day?’ the boy asked, with genuine concern.

  ‘Shipshape, I suppose,’ I said. ‘I would sell my soul for a glass of water.’

  ‘Whisht!’ he said, frowning. ‘What a way to speak! You would never.’

  His imperial sister eyed me coolly. ‘You talk like gentry,’ she accused.

  Her tone rang alarm bells in my head. She sounded like the miserable nurse. I’d never had anyone hold my accent against me before that day.

  ‘I’m a filthy sleekit tinker lass who doesnae deserve a glass of water,’ I told her.

  Neither of them answered right away. The girl and I stared at each other in sudden hostility, like cats about to fight.

  Then: ‘Who says?’ she challenged.

  ‘Everyone on this floor says!’ I glanced at the lump in the next bed – every fibre of her being and all her bedclothes appeared to be listening.

  And then, with a deep breath and in spite of the villainous headache, I changed how I was talking. Because I can.

  I grew up sharing my summers with Travellers. The Perthshire Stewarts, when they are up in Aberdeenshire, are old friends of my father’s, who is a Stuart … likely we are all related regardless of the Gallic spelling of our name. They come every year to Craig Castle, my real home, and camp there. They come in July to thin the turnips and they come back in October for the tatties. I can give you an earful in the peculiar patois code they call cant. The Stewarts laugh at me for trying, but it makes them think twice about me.

  I said to my visitors now, ‘If you brought me here, I’m likely one of your kind, aye? If I’m bingin’ wi’ Nawkens, I am no barry scaldy dilly.’

  For the first time, the girl at the foot of my bed looked away from me. She and her brother exchanged sharp, unspoken glances of warning and caution. I’d shaken her. I felt better.

  The boy said abruptly, ‘Now you do sound like a Stewart.’

  My turn to be shaken. That was canny.

  ‘I am a Stuart,’ I said rebelliously.

  The girl made a dismissive little sigh, as if she were growing bored. ‘You’re not one of those Highland Gaelic-speaking folk. Who are you really?’

  I was still mad. I was a bit mad at everything, now. I rubbed my temples. I countered fiercely, ‘I told you my name! I told you two names. Who are you?’

  ‘My real name?’ The boy grinned.

  ‘Any old name!’

  The girl spoke for him. ‘He’s called Euan McEwen.’

  ‘She’s Ellen,’ Euan said.

  Ellen suddenly gasped and laughed. ‘I ken who you are! You’re Strathfearn’s granddaughter. Julie Stuart, is it? Och aye, Lady Julia! Well then, Lady Julia, tell me – why don’t you deserve a glass of water?’

  It was like playing tennis, and we’d both won a point. We stared hard at each other. She wasn’t angry with me. She really wanted to know.

  ‘The nurses don’t know who I am,’ I said. ‘They think I’m one of you because you brought me here. One of them thought I was poking fun at her because of the way I talk.’

  Euan stood up. He padded silently to the foot of my bed, where he peered up and down the ward as if he expected the police to come along and arrest him. Finally he crept deliberately to the other end of the floor. Ellen and I watched, she standing with her arms folded and me leaning up on my elbows against my pillow. Euan picked up a glass from a tray next to someone’s bed – I saw him nodding in a friendly way as he spoke a quiet word or two to the bed’s occupant, and nobody seemed to object. Then he went to the back wall where there were worktops and a basin with running water, and he came back with the glass full.

  It was such a simple kindness.

  I drank like a person rescued from dying in a desert. I was absolutely parched. When I’d finished he took the glass and went to fill it up again.

  He filled it three times for me but I couldn’t drink the third. Ellen watched indifferently.

  Euan sat back on his heels by my bed, holding the glass. ‘Better?’ he asked.

  I nodded. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Nae bother.’

  Ellen beckoned her brother with another nod of her head. ‘We’d best be off. You’ll have everyone’s attention the now, Euan, after parading up and down the ward like a soldier. And that librarian might come back.’

  I found I didn’t want them to leave. ‘Oh, at least do stay until she comes! Mary won’t mind if you’re here –’

  ‘You think?’ Ellen gave a quiet little snort of scorn. ‘I’m not staying for the librarian.’

  ‘But –
’

  I’d somehow managed to tap into a wellspring of intolerance I hadn’t at all expected from the McEwens.

  ‘I hate that librarian!’ Ellen vowed vehemently. ‘Shaness! She doesn’t speak to you if you greet her. She stares and then she turns her back. You always feel she’s laying a curse on you.’

  Euan picked up where Ellen left off. ‘She carries a gun. She shoots into the night if she hears so much as a twig snap!’

  ‘She can’t hear a twig snap,’ I said. ‘She’s mostly deaf. It would have to be a thundering great tree limb falling before she’d hear it! I bet that’s why she doesn’t return your greeting, either. If you were a young lady living all by yourself on an island in a burn in the middle of a wood, I bet you’d carry a gun too!’

  ‘She’s skittery as a haunt,’ said Ellen. ‘She looks like a goblin. God pity her.’

  Now this was making me cross.

  ‘She has a medical thing. She was born with it. It’s called …’ My brain stretched. Yes, it still worked. ‘. . . Treacher Collins syndrome,’ I pronounced triumphantly. My elder brother Sandy had explained it to me. ‘The bones in her head didn’t get made properly before she was born. That’s why her face is so peculiar. And why she can’t hear. She is the kindest person I know.’

  ‘Not to “filthy tinker folk” she isn’t,’ said Ellen. ‘Every year when she sees Dad fishing in the burn for pearls she calls out the river watcher after him. She doesn’t even speak to Dad, just rings for the law straight away. She knows full well he’s not after salmon and that he has a right to be there. Sergeant Henderson puts up with him because they were both in the Black Watch together during the war, but every year when we come back she makes out like she’s never seen our dad before. Last year he thought he’d knock at the library door, polite, to warn her, and she told him it was Council land and he’d no right of way to cross the Inverfearnie Island bridges. She threatened him with her shotgun! And –’